


the pattern

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: ALL THE ANGST, ALL THE DAISY FEELS, Angst, Because I can, But to be on the safe side, Daisy is great leader, Daisy loves Coulson A LOT, Daisy's insecurities, F/M, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, POV Skye | Daisy Johnson, Skoulson Romfest 2k16, implied Mack/Bobbi, slightly not Lincoln Campbell friendly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 22:24:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5761168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Losing what she loves has always been a pattern in Daisy's life. </p>
<p>(Skoulson RomFest 2k16: Day 1 - "I can't lose you, too")</p>
            </blockquote>





	the pattern

_She lost her mother._

_She lost her father._

 

Bobbi was with him when it happened, and it’s a miracle she escaped in mostly one piece from the ordeal (the bruises on her neck and jaw Simmons keeps trying to attend to while Bobbi keeps pushing her away). Daisy knows that, unlike her, Bobbi is not one for bitten-lip self-recrimination (she’s a clenched-fist get-ready kind of angry, like May, and Daisy has always wanted that for herself) but that’s what she’s doing right now. That and touching Daisy’s back gently, like she knows something. It wouldn’t surprise her; Bobbi is a gifted profiler. 

“Tell me what happened,” Daisy says. 

“Daisy… don’t do that to yourself.”

Why not?

If Coulson had to endure it Daisy thinks it’s fair she is at least able to hear the details.

It should be enough to know that he was shot twice, it should be enough to know that vicious thing broke his arm in the process of smashing his prosthetic.

“Just how strong is that thing?” she asks Bobbi. The other woman looks away, the veins in her temple throbbing visibly. That strong. “And now Hydra has it…”

“It didn’t care if we were dead or not.”

Of course not, Daisy thinks, you’re _human_.

 

_Her favorite toy._

_Because it wasn’t hers to begin with._

_And she should have remembered that._

 

It’s easy to let inertia settle in and stay here looking at Coulson sleep. Better than to think how a nightmare wearing Grant Ward’s face did this to him. And how well this fits into the pattern of her life. Lincoln was right when he said she was cursed, but not for the reasons he thought. _This_ , she thinks, touching her fingertips to Coulson’s hand for a moment, then withdrawing to avoid doing any more damage, this is the real curse.

Bobbi (hand on Daisy’s shoulder like she knows something, kind profiler, Daisy finally snapping out of it enough to touch her fingers to Bobbi’s knuckle) brings her word that everyone else is safe and making their way to the Cocoon as well. At least there’s that. The Playground is burnt as a safe place ( _she lost home_ ) now that Hydra knows where it is and how to attack it.

Nowhere to go back to.

 

_She lost her home._

_Many times._

_One after the other._

_She lost one beautiful house in the country, she lost the outside walls painted in a bright blue like they were reflecting the sky. She lost the city flat where she had a room with white, tall cupboards, her school uniform clean and ironed every morning. She lost the one with the views to an ugly, gray stretch of ocean with dark sand and cold winter and with the closest thing she had to a real mother._

 

“You shouldn’t stay here all the time,” Mack says, with that tone he has that is stern and gentle at the same time.

“You’re right,” she says, realizing it’s been hours since the attack and it’s beginning to look upsetting to her team, having her stuck in medbay when they need her. She’s sure Coulson wouldn’t like her to do that for his sake. She feels tempted to say to hell with what Coulson wants or likes or would wish her to do. If he wants to say in this he should just wake up and tell her. Except she still wants to live up to his idea of her. She thinks about what he’d do in her position.

She gathers her things and walks to the door.

Mack stops her, a big and warm hand on her arm.

“You should probably grab a shower first,” he tells her.

It’s the first time she smiles since the day began.

 

_At thirteen she lost her humanity._

_Molten lava kind of rage - years before she settled for bitten lips self-recrimination - instead of blood in her veins. Old enough to know what was happening to her, too young to figure out why or that it wasn’t her fault; that would come later._

_She did recover it._

_Doesn’t mean she didn’t lost._

 

The Cocoon is not supposed to accommodate this many people but they’ll manage. She and Mack are checking that everybody has really gotten here safely while Hunter and May secure the perimeter once more. They’re going to need more security. Overcrowded, Daisy decides to send the low-level personnel to safe houses around the country for the time being. The Inhumans, Hydra’s priority target, will stay put. Mack’s weariness, Bobbi’s bruises, Hunter’s seriousness, she can barely look at it all. Joey staying very quiet, helping calm everybody down. Messages to Lincoln to warn him of the situation. She’s not sure he’d reply, even if he got them.

Her head is somewhere else the whole time, but she stops a moment and slips her fingers around Joey’s elbow and takes him aside to tell him she knows she’s asking a lot of him today and what a great job of it he’s doing. She realizes that if Coulson were here he would be doing that to her and she’s imitating. He would look at her in that way he has, like she is so good and he always knew it. Joey takes her words with solemnity and Daisy doesn’t want to let go of his arm, doesn’t want him to have to be brave and _solemn_ so quick.

“Boss…” he calls when she is already leaving, letting him go, worrying about what she’d do if something happens to him. “The Director…? Is he…?”

She shakes her head imperceptibly. “I don’t know, Joey, I…”

She’s grateful for the hallway filled with people coming and going, efficient and poised for a vague attack they don’t know if it’s even coming, and Daisy’s words get swallowed up by their noises.

 

_She lost her first girlfriend when her parents divorced and she moved to Europe with her father. The girlfriend who had an unhealthy obsession with Shirley Manson, who got Daisy to start wearing bracelets because she kept giving them to her as a present, the first person Daisy had an orgasm with. In retrospect it’s all very ordinary: teenage love, divorced parents, leaving for a different country, it happens every day. But back in the day it felt quite personal to Daisy, like someone was taking very deliberate revenge on her for daring to be happy for the first time in her life._

 

She wasn’t supposed to be in the Cocoon today. She was supposed to be at the Playground with the rest. If she had been maybe she could have… no, she would have made things _worse_ , much worse. Thank God she wasn’t there, and she is sure Coulson must have thought the same. Somehow she knows it must have been the last thought he thought before losing consciousness due to his injuries. _Thank God Daisy is safe_. She knows this, because she knows what Coulson feels for her, even if he doesn’t. She’s sure of it, because she would have thought the same thought in the end, in Coulson’s place. They are always each other’s last thoughts.

She was supposed to be there, with him, but last night they had talked on the phone and she had asked to stay with the new Inhumans (she wasn’t sure two of them were adapting as well as she hoped and wanted to talk to them some more) a couple extra days and asked that Joey stayed behind to help too. Coulson thought it was a good idea, and that they didn’t need her in the base. Daisy had teased him about it: _So you don’t need me?_ and he had been charming and impatient in his reply, _No more than I usually do_ and now Daisy wishes they had talked longer, that they hadn’t been in such a rush to go back to work, because she doesn’t know when she will hear his voice again. 

She would have asked him to talk to her some more, if she had known what was going to happen. She would have done a lot of things different, if she had known this was coming. She wants a chance to do that. She wants a do-over. She would like to start from the beginning, from the first time they met; she would tell him everything right away, not lie to him, because now she knows he deserves the trust, that he’d pay it back in spades.

 

_She lost all her possessions, left behind while she slipped away from a cyber-crime raid that landed one of her aliases an arrest warrant._

_Everything she owned was in that flat. Books, DVDs, clothes, pictures._

_Escaping was easy, the hard part was the hours right afterwards. She walked through the city like a ghost, passing through people and buildings without noticing. She realized all she owned was what she was wearing. The idea was unbearable. Like a zombie she walked into the first store she found and bought the first thing she saw. She swears hours passed before she realized she had been walking around carrying a stupid Hula Girl figurine in her hand._

 

She finds Mack and Bobbi arguing in one of the containment boxes, since there’s no room to talk anywhere else. 

“We should have burned the hard drives, all that information Hydra has now…” Bobbi is lamenting.

“We don’t know yet,” Mack replies.

“Even if they came back for it, the important stuff, this place, who we are… I can assure you they are never cracking that encryption,” Daisy tells her. It’s not pride, she just knows what she knows.

Bobbi just shakes her head. Mack keeps looking at the bruises on her face like he wants to reach out and touch them. Daisy knows the feeling. She orders Bobbi to clock off and get some rest. Bobbi looks surprised, like she wonders what kind of rank Daisy is pulling here. No levels. But this is her place, she runs this house. This day has been long enough for Bobbi, she’ll get her to rest even if she has to _order_ it.

When she is gone Daisy sits by Mack’s side.

“They could have burnt the hard drives,” Mack tells her. “That’s what Bobbi was… but Coulson didn’t give the order. He thought they could still win the fight.”

Daisy presses her cheek against Mack’s shoulder, cursing Coulson in her mind, the idiot, her favorite optimist.

 

_Miles._

_And yeah it was his own fault._

_But she was the one who lost him._

_(she lost the endless conversations about where to eat breakfast; she lost the one person who understood her love for computers, the freedom it allowed her; she lost his bony knees and the gorgeous smell of his aftershave; she lost her best friend)_

 

It’s finally night, late enough that tiredness wins out for most of the people in here, wins over fear, and they agree to retire to their bunks. Most people have to share room and that helps too, agents reassuring each other. Daisy goes over the security of the place with Hunter and Joey, tediously, checking every inch of the facility. They don’t talk about anything other than specs, and when she’s finally free (when she finally feels she has possibly done everything is there to do for today) she relieves May in watching over Coulson, and they don’t talk either.

Except - 

“Do you think he will mind… if I stay here tonight with him?” she asks May, because no one has known Coulson longer.

But she also asks because even if May thought Coulson would object to it May would never tell her so, she would let her stay anyway. Daisy doesn’t need honesty right now. 

 

_She lost a friend, a mentor, her SO._

_She lost someone whom she thought understood her in a way no one else could, because he had gone through the same, she had felt a connection was possible, maybe even a future._

_But he never understood her at all._

_She lost that too._

 

The last months had been hard enough for Coulson (grief had been hijacked by guilt, which had paralyzed him, subdued him, silenced him and Daisy had been too caught up in her own struggles to help, though she doesn’t think she could have made a difference) but things were finally looking up, quietly looking up, quiet like a soft smile at one of her bad jokes, or the way he started lingering in the kitchen while everybody ate, hungry for the team’s company. For this monster to appear in his life right now, right when he was beginning to _heal_ \- Daisy thinks it’s unfair. There’s a complete and total _unfairness_ in Coulson lying here unconscious, trapped in a broken body again. Unfair in itself, unfair _to her_. 

 

_She lost her humanity._

_Screeching, sharp sounds running through her veins instead of blood. This feeling at the pitch of her stomach like she is about to stumble and fall at every step, the ground no longer trustworthy. That hasn’t gone away, it just become manageable._

_This time she knew she was not going to take it back. She knew she couldn’t be fixed._

 

Exhaustion diffuses shame and embarrassment into something warmer, freer. She will never be the kind of person who could just push the chair closer and fall asleep with her head on Coulson’s bed or hold his hand the whole time. But she falls asleep waiting for him, watching him, staring out at him. She pulls her green jacket over her body to fight the cold, clean air of the tiny medical corner, prepared for Inhuman emergencies rather than this.

She wakes up many times during the night, always in a panic, somehow dreaming or thinking she has already lost him. Waking up with that hole in her chest believing she has woken up in a world without him. Like she had somehow let Coulson slip while she was not looking. It takes several seconds every time, several seconds of her looking at him breathing and sensing his vibrations, quiet but there, holding on, to convince herself it was just a bad feeling, not real, he’s here and relatively safe.

The worst part is that the feeling is so familiar. 

She’s spent three years wondering _when_ , not _if_. This time it has lasted longer than ever, but she knows it’s just an anomaly destined to fit into the pattern of her life, eventually. She knows the odds here. She has always been ready for Coulson not being in her life, she had just hoped this wasn’t the way she loses him.

 

_She lost her mother._

_She lost her father, too._

 

In the morning it finally looks like he is going to wake up.

As incomprehensibly as the world suddenly disappearing from under Daisy’s feet when it looked like she might never see him again, he is going to be just fine. The elbow ( _just how strong is that thing?_ ) will need a bit of work, but nothing will be permanent (it will be permanent _to her_ , this moment, how she has felt these two days). He’ll recover. 

(he _was_ recovering, damnit - it’s so unfair)

Daisy knows Coulson too well, and her joy at the idea of soon seeing him open his eyes again rolls back into fear at what will happen to him when he realizes, when he figures out where the monster comes from, what was lost yesterday ( _home_ ).

“The vitals are picking up and he’s breathing normally and -” Simmons stops herself. “And.. you probably want to be alone when he wakes up.”

Daisy doesn’t contest that, wordlessly thanks Simmons for her uncharacteristic awareness and her very familiar kindness.

She doesn’t know how he’ll feel when he wakes up, but it can’t be good (guilt again, _his failure_ all over again) and yeah, it’s better if it’s only Daisy in the room with him.

 

_She lost Lincoln._

_She was never good enough to keep him._

_He didn’t fight not to be lost. As if she wasn’t worth it to begin with._

 

She could tell him many things when he wakes up.

She could tell him she’s never been so scared in her life, and that’s saying something.

She could tell him she’s going to kill him if he dares blame himself for this.

She could tell him she loves him, if she thought he was ready to hear that.

She could tell her she can’t lose him, too.

She tells him something she knows will help, instead.

“We’ll get him,” she says.

He reaches his hand out to her, says “ _Daisy_ ” like he doesn’t even care about catching the culprit, like he doesn’t care about broken bones and tissue scarred forever, his fingers searching for her face, like he only cares about holding on to her, like only that is worth it. 

Looking at her like the rest is irrelevant.

She knows the feeling.

“I’m here,” she says, grabbing his fingers and bringing them to her mouth, kissing each fingertip, not caring if Coulson is ready or not.

I didn’t lose you, she thinks.

This doesn’t fit the pattern at all.


End file.
